Bobby Brown beefed up security in Australia because he still thinks Osama bin Laden is after him. Former party girl Taylor Stein, who just had a baby with William Lauder, has dated a lot of very, very wealthy older men. A documentary producer claims Bobby Kennedy got into a shouting match with Marilyn Monroe the night she died, and not in the bedroom where her body was found. Mom of the Year Dina Lohan is being sued for allegedly failing to pay back a $400,000 loan she used to jump-start Lindsay's music career. ABC misspelled Whoopi Goldberg's name in a press release announcing her as the new host of The View. Rudy Giuliani made up for the fact that the Yankees lost Eric Gange to the Red Sox by raising $350,000 at a Greenwich fund-raiser. Chelsea Clinton tried, and failed, to quietly read Harry Potter on the 6 train. CBS News execs are not pleased with the performance of some of the company's interns. Tyra Banks attended a party for her Air Force cadet brother, who is going to Iraq.

Famously druggie Ex-Libertines front man and Kate Moss beau Pete Doherty has announced his plans to "surrender to the gods of detoxification," and he really does seem to be trying — performing Disney classics at concerts, for example, and posting hokey home videos on YouTube.

During his Van Halen days, David Lee Roth used to pay staffers to bring him girls backstage. Pete Doherty writes in his new memoir that he and Kate Moss will get married if he stays away from the drugs. Newly minted NBC chief and notorious party boy Ben Silverman finally took, and passed, his company drug test. Not one of the Republicans Michael Moore invited to the D.C. premiere of Sicko showed up.

It's a question that must plague all celebrities: Where's the best place to be famous and act like an ass? Yesterday's news that smack-happy singer Pete Doherty has been fined a mere $1,422 for smacking — well, kicking — a female BBC reporter suggests the answer might be London. But what of our fair city? Don't celebs love New York, too? Well, if they're being strategic, maybe not. Last year, Russell Crowe had to pay a six-figure settlement for assaulting a Hotel Mercer clerk with phone. That's not only a lot more than Doherty's paying, but it's also a lot more than the $4,500 Alec Baldwin paid — admittedly in 1995 dollars — for punching a photographer who took a picture of Kim Basinger, his 1995 wife, in Los Angeles; a lot more than the $5,500 Axl Rose was fined for the inventively depraved act of biting a Swedish security guard; and presumably more than the undisclosed sum Naomi Campbell paid, in addition to taking anger-management classes, after attacking her assistant with a cell phone in Toronto. The good news is that New York does seem to remain the best place to be a lecherous but not actually violent celeb, as Christian Slater leared in 2004 when he groped the ass of a random woman on an Upper West Side sidewalk. His punishment: three days of community service.
— Ben Mathis-LilleyArts, Briefly: Pete Doherty Fined for Assault [NYT]
Celebrity and Its Discontents [NYM]
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